Innovation and IP Management
Innovation management is widely recognised as a key part of many firms’ strategic thinking and management efforts. It has become an area with rapidly growing interest from academia and industry. With a focus on technological innovation, our research aims to develop improved understanding of innovation and the associated management issues. We aim to provide support to those managing innovation through practical engagement of firms in research.
Intellectual Property Management
Investigating the role of IP in the technology and innovation processes on a strategic level in open and distributed innovation processes, as well as the use of IP information for decision making, such as technology intelligence.
Management Tools for Decision Support
Exploring the development and use of structured methods to gather, explore organise and communicate the information necessary for decision-making and management.
Breakthrough innovation
This project investigated ways in which firms can improve their capacity to generate breakthrough innovations
Innovation management - a tool set for SMEs
This work aims to combine the outputs of past research in a accessible workshop based tool set for smaller companies who wish to develop their innovation skills.
Open innovation
Our research in this area is focused on helping companies understand the opportunities and challenges of open innovation – for example, the role of intermediaries and how small and large firms can collaborate effectively.
Innovation Productivity Grand Challenge
This collaborative research programme explored the implications of the changing 21stcentury context of networked, global and increasingly open innovation – a world in which knowledge flows become as important as knowledge creation.
Emerging Industries Programme
Mapping techniques have been used to identify the patterns, enablers and barriers associated with industrial emergence, leading to a set of new methods for capturing learning from the past, and supporting strategic planning for early stage technology ventures.
Innovation processes for product service systems
Within this project we aim to explore whether, and explain how product service system (PSS) innovations impact firms’ innovation behavior. We are interested to understand whether and how PSS innovations shift firms’ innovation trajectories towards more environmentally friendly directions in order to reduce the negative externalities that result from firms’ innovation activities.
When operating PSS solutions commonly no ownership transfer takes place to the user, who enters into an enduring contractual relationship with the offering firm (i.e. instead of a single purchase contract as often characteristic for product sales). During the PSS use, its user becomes temporary proprietor enabling a high use-flexibility. In the project we primarily aim to how this impacts firms’ innovation behaviour, corporate strategic and specific operational R&D objectives as well as the trajectory that firms pursue in their innovation activities (i.e. whether PSS align economic and ecologic behaviour).
Project partners include the Institute for Innovation Research (Kiel University), Institute for Technology and Innovation Management (Hamburg University of Technology - TUHH) and the Centre for Sustainability Management (Leuphana University in Lüneburg).
